226 points by goranmoomin39 days ago | 79 comments
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"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time."
And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old.
I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.
The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion.
Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again.
I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."
It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app
I thought we used VC++ 6 to write Abomination[1] but I guess it was VC++ 4 as the dates don't align. The serial cable debugger feature was a godsend. Had the game running on one PC and stepping through it on the other. VSS would kill us, though.
I could've sworn VC++6 had Intellisense. I'm not going to dig too far to confirm but Wikipedia seems to agree with me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio) - it's not a great reference but definitely implies that it was there:
> the Visual Basic versions of IntelliSense were always more robust and complete than the 5.0 and 6.0 (97 and 98 in the Visual Studio naming sequence) versions of Visual C++
I'm also pretty certain it did, and actually that VC++5 (that I'd used as a student) didn't. I'm less confident about go to definition and stuff, but I think that was all part and parcel of the same thing, so VC++6 had it and VC++5 didn't.
(Just like today, it would sometimes fail to work, for no obvious reason, and it was impossible to figure out why, so perhaps for this article it had got itself into one of those situations...)
IIRC the Win32 docs weren't actually that bad by mid-90s standards — MSDN shipped on CD and was pretty thorough. The bigger issue was undocumented behavior that differed from the docs. Though yeah, the COM/OLE stuff was genuinely a mess.
Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps.
Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform.
Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to understand .Net and learn how to use it to build new apps and replacements for the old VB6 apps.
And somewhere along the way, many of them decided it wasn't worth the struggle (because .Net was a nightmare to install as client apps on Windows machines; even the deployment scripts had becom3 too complex), and they migrated to other tools (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) or to non-programming jobs (usually management).
Thus, within a few years, Microsoft had veritably killed the programming industry it took decades to build and nurture (and yes, Microsoft's decision to turn a blind eye - as its Windows OSes, MS Office and Visual Studio (VB & VC++) tools were pirated across the world, churning out millions of programmers and users familiar with its products as they used the pirated versions at school, college. home and office - that was also a deliberate decision by Microsoft during this halycon era).
But I feel .Net became too big of a beast even for mighty Microsoft to handle. As concerns grew over the performance aspects and innumerable dependencies of the .Net platform and related tools (Azure, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), the world started to shift away from Microsoft's tools, and that's perhaps why Microsoft finally knuckled under and embraced the open-source ecosystem it had openly hated for decades. VSCode, etc., are Microsoft's last-ditch attempts to have some relevancy in the programming industry.
.net was fine ... they were solving these fleeting problems of interoperability, event driven gui programming, object re-use and a bunch of other things. They tried tackling this so many ways: win16, ole, mfc, activex, win32s ... it was a big mess and nothing really worked well.
Microsoft had some really smart people working on the problem for years and .net was the culmination of the efforts with things like c# and the very interesting f#.
The problem was they finally solved the desktop interoperability problem when it no longer mattered and there wasn't a huge killer app for it.
Properly scoped well designed abstractions can be extremely powerful and also pretty useless.
There's an interesting counterfactual if they had .net ready to go around windows 98 ... I might be on a windows phone right now...
The IntelliSense question is genuinely murky — early versions had some completion but it was unreliable enough that people disputed whether it "counted." As far as I can tell, the feature shipped in a limited form but the name wasn't consistently applied until VS 97/VS6. The distinction between autocomplete and IntelliSense as a branded feature gets blurry in that era.
> DO NOT get it from github or transfer the files via FTP.
I bet the author doesn't know about FTP's ASCII mode, and especially doesn't know that it is the default.
ASCII mode was a nifty feature, but it never should have been the default. Especially when you consider that most text files are small and easy to re-download if you forget, while binary files are often quite large and the damage done by the line ending conversion is close to impossible to repair. Also, if you forget to convert a text file you can trivially do it on the host afterward.
> Go back and run setupsp5.exe. This time it will work. By now it should feel like you are following the solution of Monkey Island. Nothing makes sense. We are definitely deeeep into the 90s.
The whole thing compiles with 2 warnings. Incredible codebase. John Carmack definitely was/is on a different level.
Back when I was making videogames I followed a similar philosophy. No warnings (but in an orders-of-magnitude smaller and less complex codebase). Crash on failed asserts, used liberally, in debug builds. Not sure why but it seems that gamedev doesn't do this kind of rigorous engineering in general (or at least it didn't back then -- and admittedly I never worked in a big studio).
VC++ 6 was awesome, I wouldn't have a career if I didn't have pirated copies of VC++ 6 and Borland Delphi. And look at how clean and crisp it all looks. Every pixel has a purpose.
Sean Barrett, author of the stb libraries [0] which are near-ubiquitous in game development, is known among other things for still using visual c++ 6. [1]
I hope this means that Fabien is working on another Game Engine Black Book. I really love these deep dives and historical preservation of 1990's game tech.
There's supposed to be a Quake Black Book -- he mentioned it in a few interviews. The Wolf3D and Doom books are incredible reference material; we used the Doom one pretty heavily when doing some renderer work a few years back. Fingers crossed the Quake one is actually in progress.
And it was so much better/more stable than Borland C++6!
Open/close 15-30 files or mistype a path and borland gave you the good old crash. You had to handle that IDE with extreme care. You'd develop a feeling for its quirks and sometimes it would work for hours without crashing.
This drips of nostalgia. Quake being the first "lan party" title at college definitely makes me realize my age, but I credit this game for my interest in understanding LAN topologies, networking, latency and learning about multiplayer real-time interaction.
man what a great web site. the relevant stuff is right where you would look for it and it doesnt attack my attention with stupid internet mechanisms or otherwise do things i didnt tell it to do.
> In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned with NeXT stagnation, id Software switched their development stack.
id also decided no more DOS games around that time (well, maybe a year later)
> For Id Software to develop a game, a dll will be most efficient. We have more cpu power, and we can debug it more easily. We are directing significant effort towards making Quake 2 a better GAME, as well as just a better mutliplayer virtual world. Quake 1 was pretty messed up from a game standpoint, and we don't plan on doing that again.
> Speaking of portability, to remove the guesswork that goes on, here are my current opinions on the various platforms:
> Win32
> Win32 rules the world. You are sticking your head in the sand if you think otherwise. The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 / NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on win32 first. Our games should run as well as possible in NT, we won't require any '95 only features.
> DOS
> We are not going to do another dos game. No amount of flaming hate mail is going to change my mind on this (PLEASE don't!). The advantages of good TCP/IP support, dynamic linking, powerfull virtual memory, device drivers, etc, are just too much to overcome. Yes, all of those can be provided under dos in various ways, but it just isn't worth it.
> Linux
> I consider linux the second most important platform after win32 for id. From a biz standpoint it would be ludicrous to place it even on par with mac or os/2, but for our types of games that are designed to be hacked, linux has a big plus: the highest hacker to user ratio of any os. I don't personally develop on linux, because I do my unixy things with NEXTSTEP, but I have a lot of technical respect for it.
> NeXTStep
> My favorite environment. NT and linux both have advantages in some areas, but if they were on equal footing I would choose NEXTSTEP hands down. It has all the power of unix (there are lots of things I miss in NT), the best UI (IMHO, of cource), and it just makes sense on so many more levels than windows. Yes, you can make windows do anything you want to if you have enough time to beat on it, but you can come out of it feeling like you just walked through a sewer.
> In the real world, things aren't on equal footing, and I do most of my work on NT now. I hold out hope that it may not stay that way. If apple Does The Right Thing with rhapsody, I will be behind them as much as I can. NEXTSTEP needs a couple things to support games properly (video mode changing and low level sound access). If apple/next will provide them, I will personally port our current win32 products over.
> If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody, I would be very likely to give my win NT machine the cold shoulder and do future development on rhapsody. (I really don't need Quickdraw3D evangelists preaching to me right now, thank you)
There is a dozen of existing Quake ports ready to run the moment you feed them the game files, and you recommend a version re-implemented on top of Xash3D, which is a GoldSrc-compatible engine. Why?
That Xash3D choice is baffling. vkQuake or QuakeSpasm both run original id Software code and handle modern resolutions cleanly. The Xash3D base is a Half-Life engine reimplementation — using it for Quake is like running Wine to emulate Wine. Feed either one your PAK files and you're in the game in under a minute.
The toolchain nostalgia is fine until someone needs to rebuild a hotfix on a machine that isn't their personal museum. Good luck tracking down a working VC6 install in 2026.
And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old.
I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.